With every passing election, it seems clearer and clearer that the Western world's rich democracies are going through a fundamental political realignment. Out goes the old left/right political divide that we grew up with; in comes a new open/closed division. The fit is far from perfect, but generally speaking, the new order pits centrists against extremists of all stripes, the highly educated against those with less education, and those who consider themselves citizens of the world against those who identify with smaller worlds. Its central debates concern the mobility of capital, goods and ideas, but above all the mobility of people. Even the arguments over the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership pale in comparison with those over migration. The last week alone has seen uproar in the United States over Texas Senate Bill 4 (considered to be anti-immigrant in nature) and in Europe over the British government's initial proposals on the fate of citizens of other European Union countries who have migrated to Britain.

Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller and Dominik Hangartner’s study of the European refugee crisis shows broad support across Europe for the proportional allocation of asylum seekers.

International Politics and Institutions in Time is the definitive exploration, by a group of leading international relations scholars, of the contribution of the historical institutionalism tradition for the study of international politics.
Historical institutionalism is a counterpoint to the rational choice and sociological traditions of analysis in the study of international institutions, bringing particular attention to how timing and sequence of past events, path dependence, and other processes impact distributions of global power, policy choices, and the outcome of international political battles.

This book places places particular emphasis on the sources of stability and change in major international institutions, such as those shaping state sovereignty and global governance, including in the areas of international organization, law, political economy, human rights, environment, and security.

Featuring work by pioneering scholars, the volume is the most comprehensive collection to date on historical institutionalism in IR. It is projected to be of interest to multiple audiences including the international relations community, to historians, especially as that field is experiencing its own 'international' and 'global' turns, as well as sociologists and economists who work on institutions and international affairs.

What do we know about wealth inequality and democracy? Our review shows that the simple conjectures that democracy produces wealth equality and that wealth inequality leads to democratic failure are not supported by the evidence. Why are democracy and high levels of wealth inequality sustainable together? Three key features of democratic politics can make this outcome possible. When societies are divided along cleavages other than wealth, this can inhibit the adoption of wealth-equalizing policies. Likewise, voter preferences for the redistribution of wealth depend on the beliefs they form about the fairness of these measures, and some voters without wealth may feel that redistribution is unfair. Finally, wealth-equalizing policies may be absent if the democratic process is captured by the rich; however, the evidence explaining when, where, and why capture accounts for variation in wealth inequality is less convincing than is often claimed. This phenomenon is a useful avenue for future research.

What type of common asylum regime would Europeans support? We conducted a survey asking 18,000 citizens of 15 European countries about their preferences regarding different mechanisms for allocating asylum seekers across countries. A large majority supports an allocation that is proportional to each country’s capacity over the status quo policy of allocation based on the country of first entry. This majority support is weakened but persists even among a randomly assigned subset of respondents who were made aware that moving to proportional allocation would increase the number of asylum seekers allocated to their own country. These results suggest that citizens care deeply about the fairness of the responsibility-sharing mechanism, rather than only the consequences of the asylum policy. The findings also highlight a potential pathway towards reform of the Common European Asylum System.

As the World Trade Organization (WTO) begins its third decade, its future is uncertain. The initial expectation that the WTO would be the fulcrum for future international trade agreements has not been met. At best, its tenure has had mixed results. This review addresses the political consequences of WTO membership, focusing on the rules and norms of the regime and why they have become less functional over time; looks at the effectiveness of the WTO and the dispute settlement system in encouraging trade and compliance with agreements; and offers some general thoughts on the impact of shifting mass opinion on the virtue of trade agreements and other stumbling blocks the WTO faces.